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Travel around the world in search of clues left behind by the great beasts that once roamed the Earth, seas and skies. Paleoworld: Beasts, Predators and Sea Monsters retraces the steps of the dino-birds, mammoths, rhinos, crocodiles, and cats which ruled the world long before humans. With over 6 hours of fascinating discoveries and episodes including Sea Monsters, Prehistoric Sharks, Killer Raptors and earth shaking beasts, Paleoworld recreates a world we never knew and creatures we could only dream about.

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What we are, in large part, depends on our genes. It is the hand we are dealt when we are born, and the cards we play our entire lives. You can study as hard you can, but some people will be smarter. Work out as much as you want. Some people are born to be bigger, or prettier, or more artistic. The hand you get depends upon the luck of the draw. Which genes you get from your mother, which you get from your father, and how they combine to make you a unique individual, is largely a matter of chance. In the game of life, the shuffling of genes to create a new individual is called sex. But life does not have to be this way. We humans believe we are more than that: as much what we think, what we believe, what we imagine and what we hope as what we are physically. And that can transcend the selfishness of our genes, the fight for fertility, and the siren song of sex. Don't call it "love" if you wish, but species other than humans don't seem to experience the idea as we do. The power of love in humans is so striking that it seems love could be the answer to some questions science has not yet asked. Sex, however, is easier to understand. For three billion years sex has been the way of life, shuffling physical characteristics and creating enough diversity to survive whatever hand Nature deals us. Life, sex, may be "in the cards" - in the hand we are dealt - but we humans are notorious for cheating, and perhaps outwitting and transcending, that hand nature has dealt us.

Written by Maureen Lemire and Jonathan Ward
Narrated by Candice Bergen
50 minutes, English audio, 1994

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Since the early 1960's, when the possibility of human space travel became reality, kids and adventurers of all ages have dreamed of going into space themselves. But there is no environment more alien to the human body than the emptiness of space, where temperatures can fluctuate five hundred degrees. In this void, without the protection of a spaceship or a spacesuit, our blood would actually boil. It takes the most sophisticated machines ever built to get into space, and the effects of long-term space travel on the human body are still being studied. So why do so many people want to go? One of most important reasons for exploring space is to see if we're alone in the universe - whether there are other life-forms out there. It's hard to think of a more important question from the point of view of philosophy, religion, or sheer curiosity. In the meantime, the space age is in its infancy, and each generation will push it to the limit. There are no final frontiers.

Produced and written by Madeleine Carter
Narrated by Jane Curtin
Photography by Richard Dallet and Robert Neely
Edited by Paul Donvito
51 minutes, English and Mandarin Chinese dual audio, 1997

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Without magnetism, we would not have music as we know and experience it today; we would not have computers, motor vehicles, compasses, or MRI scans. Magnetism literally shapes our modern-day world. Learn how magnetic forces were first discovered and how magnetism affects both humans and other animals. Explore the role of magnetism in computers, audio recording, medicine, travel and its importance in your daily life.

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Almost all our world depends on electricity, on electrons in motion. They flow through countless switches and machines not unlike water through aqueducts and canals. They flow through our bodies and brains as if they were the spirit of our blood and bones. They can even start life as they did when researchers cloned a sheep named Dolly. A tiny spark of electricity was used to fuse cells and start the egg growing into an embryo. All this started with a curious fellow back in 1752. That was when a man with a key, Benjamin Franklin, stepped out into a storm with a kite. He snatched lightning from the heavens and introduced electricity to mankind. With this gift, mankind has shaped reality with the colors, shapes and sounds of imagination itself.

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Time - what is it? St. Augustine wrote, "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if I want to explain it to someone, I do not know." Perhaps we should ask: Did time have a beginning? A very old question, indeed. But how can we imagine a world before time began? If we count backwards beyond the clock, beyond the calendar, three and a half billion years, we arrive at our own beginning - the dawn of life on earth. Science has a word for it: biogenesis. The birth of life. With life, nature created a new kind of time; more advanced, more evolved from the time of the physical world. Memory and expectation provided us with a competitive advantage. Memory and expectation gave birth to the concept of a past and a future. Now flash forward three and a half billion years. Humanity rules the earth. Humanity is wrapped tight in ticking time. But time ticks on towards the unknown. In physics, space is represented as three dimensions. Time is represented as the fourth dimension. To describe time, we are often asked to think of objects in motion. For instance, time has been compared to the cable that drives the quaint cable cars of San Francisco. The cable car attaches itself to something that's hidden, something that's to an extent, mysterious. It is moved by a mechanism you don't know and cannot see. It just moves you along - takes you on a ride. At birth, we are clamped to a buried cable, time. And at death, cast loose from its passage. Or are we? The answer lies somewhere in time, yet an understanding of time remains as elusive and mysterious as life itself.

Produced and written by Ned Judge
Narrated by Jane Curtin
Edited by Kathleen Kane
Music by Chris Purrington
53 minutes, English and Mandarin Chinese dual audio, 1996